Scientific American (Oct. 10) – Last Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the recipients of this year’s Nobel Prize for physics; half went to David J. Thouless at the University of Washington, Seattle, and half to F. Duncan M. Haldane of Princeton University and J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University. The second half of the Nobel prize, awarded for “topological phase transitions,” also unites topology and physics, but “topology enters in a somewhat different way,” says Eduardo Fradkin, a physicist at Illinois.